Parallel finite element analysis of electric field in aluminum reduction cell based on domain decomposition method

Finite element analysis for large-scale complicated structure such as aluminum reduction cell makes higher demand on memory capacity and calculation speed, resulting in failure or inefficiency of traditional serial computation for such large-scale problems constantly. The parallelization of Jacobi preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) algorithm and boundary conditions processing is discussed based on domain decomposition method (DDM). And the storage of coefficient matrix for each sub-domain is studied based on element-by-element (EBE) strategy. Coordinate-based division is used for task partition considering structural characteristics of the aluminum reduction cell. Subsequently, parallel program of finite element analysis based on DDM is developed using C language and MPI standard library, and then applied to numeric simulation of electric field distribution in aluminum reduction cell. Parallel performance of both entire and each part of the program developed is analyzed and parallel efficiency of DDM and EBE method is compared. Experiment results show that the method is of significantly high acceleration performance and can greatly shorten the calculation time, which indicates the effectiveness of DDM´s application in parallel finite element analysis of large-scale complicated structures.